E54 – Interview with Nic Steenhout – Part 2

"It’s a frustration of mine that too often when somebody asks me a question about accessibility, the only answer I can really give if I want to be succinct is, “It depends”." Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript The second part of my chat with Léonie, in which she interviews me! "It’s a frustration of mine that too often when somebody asks me a question about accessibility, the only answer I can really give if I want to be succinct is, “It depends”." Transcript Nic:    Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 54. I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with Web Accessibility. If you’re interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you.   To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com. So this week we are continuing my conversation with Léonie but in this episode as per last week, it’s not me interviewing Léonie. It’s her interviewing me and asking me questions that I normally ask other people.   So, Hey Léonie, thanks for last week and thanks for coming back and I’m entirely yours to interrogate. Léonie:    Thanks Nic, it’s good to be back. I’m going to dive in with a pretty serious question now, I think. What are the biggest barriers you’ve experienced in trying to make the web more accessible over the years? Nic:    It’s this idea that many developers have that you can’t tack on accessibility after the fact. I was invited to be on the Joomla CSS core team when they first started after they fought for Mambo and they asked me on board specifically because I had been making a pain of myself on the Mambo forums always talking about accessibility, and they said, “Hey, Nic. Why don’t you join and we can make it accessible.” And, I lasted about a year because I ended up refactoring all the code to make it accessible and at the end, they said, “Well, maybe we’ll keep it as a third party plugin”. And that was soul destroying. Now, I haven’t looked at Joomla! in nearly 10 years so I don’t know where they're at. I don’t know if they’ve changed their approach to accessibility but that really was symptomatic of what I find a lot of. And I mention Joomla! because it’s part of my experience. Not because I want to pick on them. The folks involved now are not the same that were involved then. But, we find a lot of that. It’s like, we’re designing this website and at the end, we are going to run quality assurance and test for accessibility. Well, no. You can’t do that. You know, you complain accessibility is expensive and yes, of course it is. Because it takes a lot to refactor code and go in and fix things. It’s like if you were building a house, right? You build it with a narrow door and two front steps in the entrance. It’s going to be very expensive to put in a ramp and widen the door. But if you had put it a level entrance and a wide door to start with your extra costs would have been negligible. I think it’s the same thing on the web. Léonie:    I tend to agree. What I find really interesting about that mindset, when I encounter it, is that usually, it’s teams that would not apply the same logic to any other part of their development. If they were talking about-- last week privacy, security, the technical debt that people can accumulate through the life cycle of a project is enormous, and most good developers and development teams will go out of their way to avoid collecting technical dat. But for some reason with accessibility, somebody somewhere goes, “it’s fine” Nic:    Yeah, it is fine. No problem.